Hurricane Matthew kills 4 in Florida
CHARLESTON (AP) — Some of the South’s most historic cities faced the weakening but still powerful Hurricane Matthew as it plowed north along the Atlantic coast, flooding towns and gouging out roads in its path.
The storm killed at least four people in Florida and knocked out power to more than one million homes and businesses, even though its strongest winds stayed just offshore.
Matthew — the most powerful hurricane to threaten the Atlantic Seaboard in more than a decade — set off alarms as it closed in on the US, having left at least 900 people dead in Haiti.
The hurricane brushed the heavily populated areas of Florida and raked the Georgia coast, including some of the state’s islands such as St. Simons and Tybee.
Steve Todd defied orders to evacuate Tybee tven after the mayor called and pleaded with him to leave. As conditions rapidly deteriorated Friday night, Todd wasn’t sounding quite so bold.
”I’m not regretting staying,” Todd said by phone. “But I’m not going to lie: there’s a little bit of nervous tension right now.”
Todd said he was staying with friends at a thirdstory condo, which had lost electricity. ”It’s throwing down right now,” Todd said. “The trees are bending over. We saw a bush fly by. It’s raining sideways now.”
In Florida, the storm gouged out several large sections of the coastal A1A highway north of Daytona Beach and had nearly completely washed out the northbound lane for about a mile at Flagler Beach.
”It’s pretty bad; it’s jagged all over the place,” said Oliver Shields, whose two-story house is within sight of the highway.
The deaths in Florida included an elderly St. Lucie County couple who died from carbon monoxide fumes while running a generator in their garage and two women who were killed in separate events when trees fell on a home and a camper.
About 500,000 people were under evacuation orders in the Jacksonville area, along with another half- million on the Georgia coast. More than 300,000 fled their homes in South Carolina. The latest forecast showed the storm could also scrape the North Carolina coast.
” We have been very fortunate that Matthew’s strongest winds have remained a short distance offshore of the Florida and Georgia coasts thus far, but this should not be a reason to let down our guard,” the Hurricane Center said in a forecast discussion.
St. Augustine, which is the nation’s oldest permanently occupied European settlement and includes a 17thcentury Spanish fortress and many historic homes turned into bed-and-breakfasts, was awash in rain and gray seawater that authorities said could top eight feet.
”It’s a really serious devastating situation,” Mayor Nancy Shaver said of the city of 14,000.
“The flooding is just going to get higher and higher and higher.” Historic downtown Charleston, usually bustling with tourists, was eerily quiet, with many stores and shops boarded up with plywood and protected by stacks of sandbags.
The city announced a midnight-to-6 a.m. curfew yesterday, about the time the coast was expected to take the brunt of the storm.